GEMMA Collins has opened up about her journey with grief after heartbreakingly losing her mum.
The former Towie star announced earlier this week that her beloved mum Joan had passed away after several years of health issues.
Now, Gemma says her grief is ‘coming in waves’ and detailed how she is healing during the difficult time.
In a new Instagram post, the star shared a picture of a memorial area set up for her mum – containing a framed picture of them together, flowers, and candles.
She captioned the snap: “Grief is the price we pay for love. ❤️
“Thank you from the bottom of my heart for every message, every prayer, every kind word. I’m reading them all and getting back to everyone slowly. Please bear with me. Some moments I feel okay, and then it comes in waves.
“One beautiful thing keeps happening. A butterfly has been with me constantly, appearing wherever I go.
“It brings me a sense of peace, and in my heart I truly feel it’s my mum letting me know she’s close, watching over me, and reminding me that love never really leaves us.”
Gemma continued to say that her fans and friends were ‘holding me up’ – after a wave of tributes piled in for Joan.
She ended the post: “Thank you all for holding me up with your kindness. It means more than you’ll ever know. 🦋🤍
“She loved @paulmccartney and the @thebeatles I’m finding lots of healing listening to the music 🦋🐦⬛”.
Gemma announced her mum’s death online earlier this week, sharing how she had passed ‘peacefully’ and was finally ‘out of pain’.
Just last month, Joan was rushed to hospital after being struck down with pneumonia for the second time in the space of six months.
When her mum was admitted to hospital, Gemma told fans she “couldn’t sleep with worry”.
Just six months before her hospital visit at the start of June, Joan was hospitalised with pneumonia again.
She spent five weeks under medical care before Christmas, with Gemma describing the time as the ‘toughest of her life’.
Joan had spent time in medical care several times in recent years.
In March 2020 , she was first taken to hospital with pneumonia and it was reported that she suffers from rheumatoid arthritis.
The condition left her with a heavily compromised immune system and vulnerable to infections.
Four years later in 2024, Gemma was left heartbroken as she told how her mum was in intensive care following a breast cancer diagnosis.
At the time, Joan, who found a cancerous lump between her breast and armpit, was rushed to hospital after she stopped breathing.
Located on the Gulf of Guinea, the hot and humid West African nation shares borders with Togo to the west, Nigeria to the east, and Burkina Faso and Niger to the north.
The region of modern day Benin first came to the attention of the Europeans as a source of slaves with the shores of the region earning the name ‘the Slave Coast’.
Local warlords made agreements with the Portuguese to supply slaves from captured prisoners. One important local kingdom at the time was the Dahomey, known for their military discipline, who grew to be the dominant power in the region.
Dahomey means ‘on the belly of Dan’. Dan was the name of a rival king. Defeated by the Dahomey, they built their royal compound over his grave.
With the abolition of the slave trade, the control of the Dahomey was weakened, allowing the French to take over the region at the end of the nineteenth century. In 1904, the colony of French Dahomey was incorporated within French West Africa.
In 1946 with the establishment of the Fourth French Republic, Dahomey became an overseas territory of France with its own parliament and representation in the French national assembly.
On December 4th 1958, it became the Republic of Dahomey (République du Dahomey), a self-governing autonomous republic within the French Community.
On July 11th 1960 France agreed to Dahomey becoming fully independent. Dahomey gained its full independence on August 1st 1960, with Hubert Maga becoming Dahomey’s first president.
In 1975, the country changed its name to Benin, after the Bight of Benin, a large bay in the Gulf of Guinea.
WASHINGTON — President Trump said Friday that his $1.8 billion anti-weaponization fund is “dead” while also continuing to defend it, further complicating his administration’s negotiations with two Republican senators who are blocking his attorney general nominee in protest.
Trump told reporters at Camp David on Friday morning that administration officials had “agreed not to have a fund” that compensates his political allies, yet made clear that he disagrees with that decision.
The comments came hours after an early morning social media post in which Trump said people who had been prosecuted by the Justice Department — many of them for their involvement in the violent Jan. 6, 2001, attack on the Capitol — “are suffering still, many ruined, and I felt that they should be given compensation for what has been done to them.”
Trump’s reluctant declaration that the fund won’t be created came as Republican Sens. John Cornyn of Texas and Thom Tillis of North Carolina, both members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, say they won’t support Todd Blanche’s nomination for attorney general until they see that promise in writing. They have been working for weeks with the White House and Blanche, who is now the acting attorney general, to produce a document to that effect, but both senators have said they aren’t satisfied so far.
“The President made it clear today that the so-called Anti Weaponization Fund is still alive, which is exactly why we are attempting to formally end it,” Tillis said after Trump’s initial social media post.
Trump said in his post that Blanche should be immediately confirmed and is a “pawn in this whole thing.”
Blanche said at a hearing two months ago that the anti-weaponization fund would not move forward after Republican senators revolted and held up an immigration funding bill.
But Tillis, who is retiring when his term ends in January, and Cornyn, who lost reelection this year after Trump endorsed his primary opponent, said they want to ensure that the White House doesn’t reverse course, especially as Trump continues to argue that a fund is needed.
The Justice Department has provided the senators with language that says Blanche’s May 18 order establishing the “Anti-Weaponization Fund” is “rescinded and shall have no force or effect,” according to a document reviewed by The Associated Press.
Cornyn and Tillis have said they also want some clarifications on a separate piece of the settlement that would grant Trump and members of his family immunity from tax audits. Cornyn said this week that it was his understanding that the audits could extend to more than 100 different Trump organization subsidiaries into the future.
“Todd Blanche said it was limited to the parties to the litigation — and it was retrospective, not prospective,” Cornyn said. “And all we’re doing is asking them to put that in writing.”
The Judiciary Committee postponed a vote on Blanche’s nomination that had been scheduled for Thursday morning after Tillis and Cornyn said they needed more from the administration before they could provide the necessary votes.
After the meeting was delayed, Trump said in a social media post that he might pull Blanche’s nomination and resubmit it after Cornyn and Tillis leave office next year. But the two sides continued to negotiate through Thursday afternoon, when Blanche, Cornyn and Tillis met on Capitol Hill.
On Friday, a person familiar with the negotiations said talks had been positive, but the senators were still awaiting a new offer from the Justice Department. The person requested anonymity to discuss the private negotiations.
The two senators have repeatedly said the Justice Department seemed interested in reaching an agreement, but the White House wouldn’t budge even to aid the confirmation of Trump’s loyal former personal attorney, who has aggressively pursued the administration’s priorities as acting attorney general.
“I think as far as Blanche and the Department of Justice, we were pretty much on the same page,” Cornyn said Thursday. “But then when the president got wind of it, he wasn’t willing to go along with it.”
Tillis said Blanche “has been forthright, thoughtful and patient” but attributed the holdup to an “incompetent personal advisor” to the president, even as Trump himself continued to advocate for the fund.
Behind the scenes, Trump legal adviser Boris Epshteyn is being blamed as an obstacle to an agreement that would let Blanche move forward, according to three people who have direct knowledge of the discussions and requested anonymity to discuss them.
Saying the AP’s “sources are wrong,” White House communications director Steven Cheung said “anyone trying to assign blame to the President or his team has no earthly idea of what is going on and clearly is trying to deflect from the issue at hand — Todd Blanche will be an exceptional Attorney General and he should be confirmed immediately.”
Also on Friday, Trump’s attorneys notified a court it would appeal a judge’s scathing ruling that characterized the settlement of the president’s lawsuit against the IRS as an improper exercise in self-dealing. The judge in her order earlier this month referred one of Trump’s attorneys for potential disciplinary action and criticized Blanche’s involvement in the settlement, given his prior representation of Trump.
Blanche has said he disagrees “with the judge’s insinuations” about him.
Even as they are usually deferential to Trump, a number of Republican senators have expressed strong objections to the settlement.
“The criminals who assaulted police officers and defiled our nation’s Capitol are not ‘great American patriots’ who are ‘victims of government abuse,’” Tillis said, echoing Trump’s comments about the rioters who could potentially have received payouts. On his first day back in office, Trump pardoned more than 1,500 people who had been charged in the attack.
Republican Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana said Thursday that the majority of Senate Republicans aren’t comfortable with the settlement fund.
“Blanche said it’s dead, and he testified that it’s not coming back,” Kennedy said. “But for whatever reason, somebody didn’t want to put it in writing.”
Jalonick, Kim and Richer write for the Associated Press. AP writers Eric Tucker and Lisa Mascaro contributed to this report.
Day nine highlights:
A huge 44 gold medals to be won across two sessions of athletics, boxing, track cycling and judo.
All 14 of the men’s and women’s boxing finals take place at the SEC Centre – with seven English fighters seeking gold medals.
The men’s mile is the highlight of the athletics schedule, with Scotland’s world record holder Josh Kerr favourite to take the gold
Plus, 2018 champions England face New Zealand in the netball semi-finals.
Schedule (all times BST and subject to change):
08:30-14:00 – bowls and Para-bowls
09:00-11:00 – netball – England v New Zealand semi-final
10:00-13:30 – track cycling and Para-track cycling
10:00-14:00 – athletics and Para-athletics – eight gold medals
11:00-14:00 – judo – last 16, quarter-finals and semi-finals
11:00-14:30 – boxing – seven gold medals
13:00-15:00 – netball – Australia v Jamaica semi-final
15:00-19:15 – track cycling and Para-track cycling – six gold medals including men’s sprint final
15:00-20:45 – bowls and Para-bowls – semi-finals
16:00-18:45 – judo – five gold and bronze medal contests
16:30-22:00 – boxing – seven gold medals
18:30-22:00 – athletics and Para-athletics – 11 gold medals including 4x100m relay finals from 20:15, men’s 800m final at 20:45, men’s mile at 20:55, mixed 4x400m relay final at 21:20 and the women’s mile at 21:45
The administration of United States President Donald Trump has moved to drop a criminal charge against former Olympic athlete David Hearn, in a remarkable about-face.
In a motion filed on Friday afternoon, US Attorney Jeanine Pirro acknowledged that the accusations levelled against Hearn — blaming him for vandalising the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool — did not appear to be substantiated.
list of 3 itemsend of list
“The damage was the result of a botched installation and not vandalism, as initially represented by [the Department of the Interior],” Pirro wrote.
Earlier this month, the prosecutor had accused Hearn, an Olympic canoeist, of “forcefully and violently” ripping the newly installed liner of the Reflecting Pool, part of a renovation project Trump had championed.
She described his actions as “an affront to the dignity of our shared history” and warned that Hearn could face up to 10 years in prison for the destruction of government property.
But in Friday’s court filings, a different narrative emerged.
Pirro repeatedly emphasised she did not receive the new information until after the criminal indictment against Hearn had been returned. She blamed, in part, the “barebones police reports” her office had received.
“It was not until after the return of the indictment, that the DOI provided additional documents to the [US Attorney’s Office for Washington, DC] indicating that damage to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool in June 2026 was the result of flawed installation by the contractor,” Pirro wrote.
She added that the pressure to finish the Reflecting Pool renovation project before the Independence Day holiday — marking the 250th anniversary of the US — contributed to the renovation’s failure. Trump had planned several events for the occasion.
“The rush to complete the project led to hasty and botched work that was not remediated before the project was finished and the fencing removed,” Pirro explained, citing delayed installation work, inclement weather and repeated testing failures.
The Reflecting Pool project is one of several changes to the landscape of Washington, DC, that Trump has pursued during his second term in office.
In seeking to leave his mark on the US capital, the Republican leader has torn down the East Wing of the White House, gilded statues with a fresh coat of gold leaf, and proposed to build a large triumphal arch on the road to the Arlington National Cemetery.
Just this week, he unveiled a $22.5bn project to revamp the Dulles international airport, the main air terminal for the capital region.
Several of his public works projects have been challenged in court, including an attempt to affix his name to the John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
The Reflecting Pool renovation was among Trump’s most controversial.
The 618-metre (2,028-foot) pool has served as the backdrop for many iconic moments in US history, including the 1963 March on Washington, when civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech.
It sits between the Washington Monument, a large obelisk, and the Lincoln Memorial, two popular tourist sites mere blocks from the White House. But the pool had long struggled with leaks along its granite edge and concrete bottom.
In April, Trump abruptly announced he would address the problem by resurfacing the Reflecting Pool’s bottom with swimming pool coating in a shade of “American Flag Blue”.
The project, he added, would be finished “long before July 4” and at relatively little cost to the government.
By early June, Trump had announced the project was complete. But within days, a thick layer of green algae appeared on the surface of the pool, and the blue coating appeared cracked, with sheets of paint flapping in the water.
The project also attracted criticism for how the government contract for the renovations was awarded.
The Trump administration granted a $13.1m contract to Atlantic Industrial Coatings, a company he claimed to have worked with as a real estate developer, led by one of his donors. The deal was struck without taking competitive bids, as is standard, on the basis that the renovation was necessary immediately.
Within two days of the site’s final inspection, on June 11, a National Park Service engineer observed that the Reflecting Pool’s new lining had begun to peel, according to Pirro.
Citing the engineer’s report, Pirro wrote that the damage to the pool appeared to have been caused by “over spraying and delamination”.
But Trump had aggressively pushed accusations that the algae and tears in the Reflecting Pool’s new bottom had been the result of vandalism.
“We caught some people vandalising our beautiful Reflecting Pool,” Trump said at a news conference in June. “They took a cutter, a box cutter, or something very sharp. Can you imagine? Where do these people come up with this? And they threw a little fertiliser in the water.”
Separately, he suggested those responsible should face “years in jail” for their alleged crimes.
Hearn, a three-time Olympian representing the US, has said he was among the members of the public drawn to the hullabaloo surrounding the Reflecting Pool’s controversial renovation.
In media interviews, he admitted he bicycled past the pool, reached in and felt the peeling sealant, out of curiosity. He has adamantly denied, however, damaging any property.
Hearn was among at least seven people arrested or cited over alleged damage to the Reflecting Pool. His indictment was announced at a news conference held by Pirro on July 2.
Friday’s motion to dismiss arrived just four weeks later. In it, Pirro acknowledged the peeling was not caused by vandalism.
She wrote that the revelation came around July 17, when her office inspected the Reflecting Pool site, which had once again been drained for repairs.
“It was at that time that [the US Attorney’s Office] first became aware of the significant damage throughout the pool and accordingly requested all documents from [the Department of the Interior] concerning how the pool was lined,” Pirro said.
Her office received “695 megabytes of additional documents” in return, revealing “a rushed and flawed installation process”.
Since indicting Hearn, Pirro’s office has faced questions about whether it was pursuing justice — or simply doing Trump’s political bidding, as he seeks to save face after the botched renovation.
The withdrawn indictment also comes as courts have repeatedly pressed the Department of Justice about prosecutions that appear to be hastily submitted and lacking in evidence.
“ Did you ultimately decide to charge this so harshly at the president’s direction?” one reporter asked Pirro at the outset of Hearn’s case.
“I didn’t charge anything harshly. I charge according to the evidence,” she replied at the time.
In a statement, Hearn’s legal team called the case an “abuse of government power”. They added that the Trump administration owes their client an apology.
The crossing of 60,000 migrants into the Spanish North African enclave of Ceuta from Morocco is featured prominently across Saturday’s papers.
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In a book nerd battle that’s become so epic, even The Onion has satirized the saga, acclaimed author Susan Orlean has grabbed the mic, and Emily Wilson is admitting she has one regret in her review of “The Odyssey.”
Earlier this week, Joyce Carol Oates panned Wilson’s critique of Christopher Nolan’s big-screen adaptation, and now acclaimed author and journalist Susan Orlean has entered the chat.
“I loved The Odyssey (saw it twice) and love any piece of art that gets people talking and reading and thinking,” she posted on Threads on Thursday. “Emily Wilson is being a bit of a jerk.”
Choice words from Orlean, but she knows a thing or two about film adaptations: her 1998 book “The Orchid Thief” inspired Spike Jonze’s 2002 film “Adaptation” starring Nicolas Cage and Meryl Streep (who played Orlean), and her 1998 article “Life’s Swell” was brought to screen as “Blue Crush,” also in 2002.
“Why can’t things be the things they are and if they’re different from their source material that’s their new form and their own thing and I SAY THIS FROM EXPERIENCE,” she added in a separate post.
The ire stems from a biting 4,200-word takedown of “The Odyssey” penned by classicist Wilson, who translated Homer’s poem in 2017.
In early interviews discussing the film, Nolan referenced Wilson’s translation, which subsequently skyrocketed in sales. A representative for Audible told The Times on Wednesday that, year over year, purchases of Wilson’s “Odyssey” translation were up by more than 600% across Audible’s U.S., U.K. and Canadian marketplaces.
Wilson’s review, published in the London Review of Books, essentially dubbed Nolan’s film a dud for academics with taste and a blockbuster hit for virgins who like special effects that go “Boom!”
“Nolan’s Odyssey lacks many of the elements that make the poem great. It has nothing convincing to say about time, memory, history, war, or about the relationship between one warrior’s glorious return and the lives of his family, adversaries, comrades, friends and neighbours,” she wrote. “It lacks psychological, emotional, political and ethical depth. Its narrative structure is gimmicky. The writing is abysmal. None of the characters has convincing motivation for their actions or words. There are no sex scenes, and all the food looks horrible.”
Pulitzer Prize finalist Oates, like Orlean, is also team Nolan. “Her tone of dismissal & haughty superiority strike a sour note,” Oates said of Wilson’s review in a post on X. Oates added that rather than Wilson disagreeing with “interpretations of Homer in a collegial manner,” she benefited from Nolan’s film and then attacked it.
Wilson’s review went so viral it crashed the London Review of Books website for a few hours on Monday. On the heels of the missive’s publication, Wilson posted on Bluesky that an earlier draft of the essay was actually more cutting than the version that went live.
“Was I too mean? Or not mean enough? I went through my first draft and tried to take out the snark,” she wrote. “To quote the great poet: ‘Though much is taken, much remains… That which we are, we are.’”
She added in the same thread: “The oddest thing about the response to this essay is people who say it’s ‘personal’. You can disagree about some or all of it! I may well be wrong! But it’s not ‘personal’ to analyze a film or other work of art, even negatively. Criticism is more than ‘Hurray!’ or ‘Hiss!’”
One criticism Wilson admits she regrets in retrospect is her take on Nolan’s race-neutral casting. In the review she wrote that while the casting launched a culture war, it wasn’t actually progressive. She likened the characters portrayed by Zendaya, Lupita Nyong’o, Himesh Patel, Corey Antonio Hawkins and Travis Scott to “versions of the Black best friend, whose only role in the drama is to provide aid to the white protagonist.”
On Bluesky, she wrote, “In this piece, I regret the paragraph about the uses of the POC actors – who are all great, but IMO under-utilized (and why couldn‘t Himesh Patel be Odysseus instead?) I still think the film largely wastes its strong cast, but I framed it badly.”
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